Ready Player Two (9781524761356)

by Cline, Ernest

  I opened my Mandarax translation software and used it to translate the Morse code into letters, only to discover that he was spelling out M-O-R-S-E.

  I’d never seen a Tom Cruise NPC of any kind on Halcydonia. Content from R-rated movies was expressly forbidden here. So what was going on?

  Less than a minute later, I spotted another out-of-place NPC—Raymond “Rain Man” Babbitt, Dustin Hoffman’s character from the same film. He was staring off into space, while rocking slowly back and forth, shifting his weight from his left foot to his right foot. But I could see right away that he was making these movements in a pattern—a mix of short hops and long hops, like Morse code. According to my Mandarax translator software, his feet were tapping out the same word his brother had been tapping out on his steering wheel: M-O-R-S-E.

  I didn’t have time to ponder it now, because we’d arrived at Castle Calculus, which was located at the city center. We mounted the ornate marble steps out front, which had a bunch of different math proofs and equations carved into them, and passed through the castle’s grand entranceway, then continued on into Queen Itsalot’s throne room.

  Normally, she wouldn’t have granted us an audience so quickly. But I’d already met the queen once before, back when she awarded me the Silver Abacus of Itsalot for completing every math quest on the planet before my twelfth birthday. When I presented the abacus to the Itsalot master-at-arms, he bowed and stepped out of my way, allowing my friends and me to pass.

  We walked up the long velvet carpet leading to the queen, who waved to me from her throne. She wore a gold crown with a large jewel-encrusted plus sign as its headpiece, and mathematical proofs and equations adorned her robes, stitched into their gold fabric with bright red thread. Her family’s coat of arms—the same coat of arms etched into the Third Shard—hung on the wall behind her.

  She was currently reading a large storybook to a group of baby animals gathered around her feet. But when she saw me approaching, she closed the book and sent them away.

  When I reached her throne, I knelt before her and bowed my head, and motioned for Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis to do the same.

  “Rise, Sir Parzival!” cried Queen Itsalot. “My noble subject and dear friend! How good to see you again, after so many years. What brings you back to my kingdom?”

  I rose to my feet, then took out the Third Shard and showed her the coat of arms engraved upon it.

  “I’m on a quest to find the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul,” I said. “And I think one of them might be hidden here in your kingdom. Can you help me find it, Your Majesty?”

  Her eyes widened in surprise. She looked utterly delighted.

  “Indeed I can, dear boy!” she replied. “The shard was given to me for safekeeping, a long time ago. I wondered if anyone would ever show up here looking for it, and now here you are, at long last. But before I can give it to you, you’ll need to earn all fifty Halcydonia Wearit-Merit Badges.”

  Behind me, I heard all three of my friends inhale sharply. I glanced back at them.

  “Oh my God,” Aech said. “Fifty? How long is that going to take?”

  “Relax,” I said. “I spent years here, earning all those badges. With a lot of help from my mom…”

  I opened my avatar’s inventory and dug around until I found my old Halcydonia Wearit-Merit Badge sash. Then I presented it to the queen with both hands.

  She took the sash from me and looked it over, running her wrinkled fingers down the rows of embroidered patches, each one bearing a different symbol or icon. She counted them one by one, and when she reached fifty, she smiled and nodded to herself. Then she snapped her fingers and there was a blinding flash of light.

  When my eyes recovered, I saw that my sash had vanished from the queen’s hand. Now she was holding the Fourth Shard. It sparkled in the bright sunlight pouring into the throne room, through the thousands of stained-glass windows that made up its domed ceiling. (Each one of these windows paid tribute to a different public school teacher, and had been placed here by one of their students.)

  Queen Itsalot tilted the shard so that it reflected the different-colored shafts of light, turning the throne room into a giant kaleidoscope for a few seconds. Then she lowered it and held it out, offering it to me.

  I knelt before her, then I reached up and took the shard from the queen’s hands, being careful not to meet her gaze. (If I did, there was a good chance she would send me off on a mandatory math quest to rescue one of her royal relatives—usually her husband, the clueless King Itsalot, who was constantly being taken prisoner by the evil wizard Multiplikatar, who tossed him into the Long Division Dungeons beneath Protractor Peak, located high in the MoreStuff Mountains.) As I wrapped my fingers around the shard, once again I tried to prepare myself for the jolt of what I knew was coming, from the toll I had to pay….

  * * *

  I—or rather Kira—rushed into a cluttered office to find Og sitting at his desk, hard at work on his computer. He turned and Kira held out her sketchpad, and I saw that she’d drawn the Halcydonia Interactive company logo on it.

  This was another moment I’d heard Ogden Morrow talk about in interviews and in his biography. Kira had just designed the logo in a fit of inspiration in her own office, down in the GSS Art Department, and then she’d run here to Og’s office to show it to him.

  Og looked at the sketch, cried out, “It’s perfect!,” and rose to throw his arms around Kira.

  * * *

  Then I found myself back in Queen Itsalot’s throne room on Halcydonia, clutching the Fourth Shard. I didn’t even have to turn it over to see the clue engraved into it this time, because it already happened to be facing me when I held the shard up to look at it.

  It was another symbol, created from a combination of symbols. It looked like the Mars and Venus gender symbols aligned and placed on top of each other, as if they were having intercourse, with a backward number 7, the top of which curled into a spiral, laid on top of that. Together, these shapes formed a symbol that was still instantly recognizable to any student of late-twentieth-century popular culture, and to any true fan of rock or funk music:

  When I saw it, I began to chuckle in disbelief. Then I closed my eyes and shook my head, bracing myself for the unprecedented amount of grief that I knew Aech would be giving me in just a few seconds.

  I bowed and thanked the queen, then backed away from her until I was able to step off the dais. When I turned around on the top step, I saw Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto studying my face anxiously, trying to read my expression. Art3mis had all of her fingers crossed and was holding them up to show me.

  “Well?” Aech said.

  I lowered my head in defeat and held out the shard so they could all see the symbol engraved on it. Then I closed my eyes and silently began to count to three. I only made it to one….

  “Oh-my-fucking-God!” Aech cried. “No way! It can’t be!” She started to do a funky dance toward me, then she started to dance around me. “That’s Love Symbol #2, Z! It’s Prince!”

  “Prince who?” Shoto asked.

  “The Prince,” Aech said. “As in ‘the Artist Formerly Known as’? The Prince of Funk! The High Priest of Pop! His Royal Badness. The Purple One!”

  “Oh yeah,” Shoto said. “He’s the dude who changed his name to a Glyph of Warding back in the ’90s, right?”

  Aech pointed a finger of warning at him, then smiled wide.

  “We’re in luck, guys,” she said, still dancing in place. “My dad left me his entire collection of Prince’s music and films when he moved out. I grew up listening to them and watching them. I probably know more about Prince and his artistic output than any other human being in history.”

  “I know,” I said. “Do you have any idea how many times you tried to make me watch Purple Rain with you?”

  She stopped dancing and pointed an accusing finger at me. “And do
you remember how many times you actually sat through the entire film with me? Nada. Never. Not once. And we both know why, don’t we? It was because Prince always made you feel a little sexually confused and uncomfortable, didn’t he?”

  The old Wade would have denied this. But like I said, the ONI had broadened my horizons. Enough, at least, for me to recognize the truth about my adolescent self.

  “OK, maybe that’s a little true,” I said, smiling. “Whenever I was watching old episodes of Friday Night Videos and ‘When Doves Cry’ came on, I always averted my eyes when he was getting up out of that bathtub. Every single time.” I placed my right hand over my heart. “Please accept my sincere apologies, Aech. I’m sorry I never let myself appreciate Prince’s genius.”

  Aech closed her eyes and raised one palm to the sky like a gospel singer and shouted, “Finally! The truth!”

  “So where do we need to go?” Shoto said. “I take it there’s a Prince planet somewhere?”

  Aech scowled at him.

  “Yes, fool,” Aech said. “There is an entire OASIS planet devoted to Prince, his life, his art, and his music. But we don’t call it ‘the Prince planet.’ Its name is an unpronounceable symbol. The symbol on that shard. But you can refer to it by its nickname, ‘The Afterworld.’ It began as a shrine created shortly after the Purple One’s death, during the first decade the OASIS was online. Kira Morrow was one of the fans who helped build it.”

  Aech threw up a 3-D hologram of the Afterworld. It wasn’t a sphere, like most other OASIS planets. It was shaped exactly like the symbol etched into the Fourth Shard—what Aech had referred to as Love Symbol #2.

  “It’s in Sector Seven, located right next to Beyoncé, Madonna, and Springsteen, in the superstar cluster,” Aech said. “The Afterworld’s surface is covered with a stylized re-creation of downtown Minneapolis in the late 1980s, along with locations from Prince’s other movies and music videos. You can walk into a simulation of every club gig and concert he ever performed during his career. It’s a big place….It’s easy to get lost and wander around in circles there. And we don’t even know where to start looking for the shard….”

  “Hopefully the shard will give us another clue once we get there,” I said.

  Aech nodded.

  “There’s no time like the present,” she said. “Ready to roll?”

  I nodded and turned around to wave farewell to Queen Itsalot, who was once again reading to her baby-animal subjects. She waved back at me, and it occurred to me that I should ask her if she’d seen Ogden Morrow here earlier today. But no—Og had only collected the first three shards before he’d called it quits. Which was pretty strange, now that I thought about it. Og was one of Halcydonia’s creators. This should have been the easiest shard for him to obtain. And this also would have been an extremely easy place for him to hide clues about his location, since he had admin permissions on the whole planet, and total control of its NPCs, so he could’ve changed anything he wanted….

  That was when it hit me. Maybe Og had left more clues for me here. I’d already seen them—the unauthorized, R-rated Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman NPCs. But what the hell was he trying to say? Like his high score on Ninja Princess, I just needed to figure out why he…

  Just then, a flashing alert icon appeared on all of our HUDs. I reached out and tapped the one flashing on mine.

  “We just got a group text from Faisal,” I said. “Saying he needs to see us right away. He wants us back at the conference room on Gregarious, so Anorak can’t eavesdrop.”

  “Sorry, Aech,” Art3mis said, resting a hand on her shoulder. “It looks like we need to make a quick pit stop before we head to the Afterworld.”

  “OK,” she said. “But Faisal better make it quick!”

  “Yeah,” Shoto said. “And this time he better have some good news for us.”

  Before I could say how unlikely I thought that was, Aech used her admin ring to teleport us directly back to the conference room on Gregarious.

  Sure enough, as soon as we took our seats, Faisal told us he had “even more bad news to share.” But as he began to relay it, it quickly became clear that “bad” wasn’t a strong enough adjective, and that “downright apocalyptic” would have been far more accurate.

  Once we were all back inside the conference room, seated in our usual spots around the table, Faisal had our OASIS engineers confirm that Anorak wasn’t in the vicinity, or on the planet. They also said they had placed Anorak on the planet’s block list, so Anorak should no longer even have been able to visit Gregarious. We also had our admins add several extra layers of security to our conference room, which effectively sealed it off from the rest of the OASIS, making it impossible to eavesdrop on us through any magical or technological means.

  Once we had taken all the precautions we could think of, Faisal stepped up to the podium and cleared his throat a few times. Then, in a defeated voice, he asked us if we wanted the “bad news” or the “even worse news.”

  Bad news first won by unanimous vote.

  “Another problem has arisen due to Anorak’s firmware hack,” he said. “I’ve kept it from you until now because I didn’t want to distract you while you were looking for—”

  “Spill it already, Faisal!” Aech shouted.

  “It’s OK,” Art3mis said. “Just tell us what’s going on. We’re not going to fire you.”

  Faisal pursed his lips, and for a few seconds he looked like he might break down and cry.

  “Anorak has figured out a way to alter the behavior of our NPCs,” he said.

  We all shouted “What?!” in unison, so loud it made Faisal flinch. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then he opened them and continued.

  “About an hour ago, all the NPCs in sectors one through four started to behave erratically and wander outside their designated operational boundaries. Some of these rogue NPCs have even gone off-world….”

  “NPCs can’t go off-world,” Art3mis said. “Unless they’ve been programmed to do so, as part of a user quest…”

  “That’s true,” Faisal replied. “Anorak must’ve altered their programming somehow.”

  “OK,” I said. “What exactly are these rogue NPCs doing?”

  Faisal motioned to the viewscreen, where he began to play a rapid series of simcap clips. Each one gave us a first-person view of one or more NPCs suddenly breaking character, going berserk, and attacking an unwitting player avatar. We saw surfers, sidekicks, shopkeepers, pit mechanics, butlers, maids, background citizens, and wise old mentors all going postal, on hundreds of different OASIS worlds. Taken as a whole, the footage made it look like the OASIS had suddenly turned into a nightmarish mash-up of Westworld, Futureworld, and Jurassic World, with a smattering of Imaginationland, Tomorrowland, and Zombieland all mixed in for good measure.

  “The NPCs in those sectors all turned homicidal at the same time,” Faisal said. “A little over twenty minutes ago. And they’re able to use public teleportation terminals now, so they’re running amok all over the simulation, attacking and killing every avatar unlucky enough to cross their path. They appeared to be attacking players on sight and at random. Even in safe zones, where getting zeroed-out by an NPC is supposed to be impossible. The NPCs loot all of the money, weapons, magic items, and artifacts dropped by the avatars they kill.” He motioned to the viewscreen. “And then they take all of that loot to Chthonia and deliver it to Anorak inside his castle. Watch….”

  He showed another piece of simcap footage, which looked as if it had been taken from the POVs of several different hijacked NPCs. We saw a shot of Castle Anorak from a distance, and there were hundreds of thousands of NPCs lined up in front of it. They were slowly filing into the castle’s front entrance, and then back out one of its numerous exits, each of them now dressed in matching red-and-black studded leather armor. Once the NPCs were back outside, they joined the orderly ranks that
were forming up around the castle. These ranks already stretched to the horizon in every direction, like orcs amassing around Isengard.

  Then the simcap we were watching cut to another POV—that of an NPC standing inside the castle throne room. Anorak was sitting with one leg draped over the arm of his golden throne. Sorrento was standing off to his right with a malevolent smile on his face, trying to look imposing. He was dressed in black plate-mail armor that was covered in spikes. Both of his hands (enclosed in enormous black gauntlets) were resting on the hilt of a giant black-bladed bastard sword with magic runes carved into its blade. When I translated them, I realized that Sorrento’s avatar appeared to be wielding the cursed blade Stormbringer, and I suddenly felt ill.

  Faisal paused the simcap file for a moment and zoomed in on Sorrento’s smug mug.

  “We did find out how Anorak was communicating with Sorrento while he was in prison,” Faisal said. “As we suspected, it was during his allotted weekly OASIS recreation time. For thirty minutes every Saturday, Sorrento was allowed to log in with a conventional haptic rig. His usage logs indicate he spent nearly all of that time at a free public library on Incipio, reading articles about Mr. Watts and the other members of the High Five. Anorak appears to have taken control of the library terminal Sorrento was using to open a line of text communication with him. The inmate-monitoring software didn’t catch it at the time, and Anorak erased any record of what they said to each other, but we think it must be how they coordinated Sorrento’s escape.” He let out a sigh. “Still no sign of either him or Og.”